More on @BizLondon July cover story, Moffatt and Powell #LdnOnt

            It’s often said umpires or referees have done an excellent job officiating a game if no one notices them during the game or remembers them after. If, on the other hand, they perform like baseball’s C.B. Bucknor and blow calls, forget the ball-strike count and toss managers from the game when they ask for explanations, they are hardly invisible.

C.B. Bucknor in action

            The same goes for generational transitions within family-owned companies. When they go right, we never hear about them. But when they go wrong, whoa, do we hear about them. Sometimes it ends up in court. Sometimes the company is sold to outside interests. However they end, Thanksgiving is never the same for the extended family.

            Here in London, the first example many people think of is Cuddy International, which was sold to Cargill Ltd. in 2001 after a decade of jockeying by members of the family to run, buy or sue the company patriarch Mac Cuddy had built. The battle was the C.B. Bucknor of family squabbles. But it was hardly alone. Family succession planning can take many forms, including no planning at all. Nothing happens until the person running the business gets sick or dies. Panic ensues and the business tanks.

            This month’s Business London magazine cover story is about Moffatt and Powell, the Southwestern Ontario lumberyard and building centre. It is a prime example of family succession done well.

            Four years ago, Nancy Powell-Quinn and her husband D’Arcy Quinn bought the business from her father, Dave Powell, and his business partner, Keith Moffatt. Dave continues to play an informal role with the company, but it is clearly being run by the next generation. Since taking over, the thirtysomething couple has modernized and expanded, fighting for market share in a segment dominated in North America by Home Depot and Lowe’s. They forged a buying alliance with Rona and are in the process of broadening the range of products and services offered at their six locations.

Moffatt and Powell HQ, Hyde Park in London

            But it was never their goal to do any of that. In fact, they were happily living in Winnipeg, both with thriving careers, when her father – visiting for Christmas in 2006 – broached the idea of their coming back to London and getting involved with the company.

            It seems many a successful in-family transition includes new owners who have spent some time out in the workforce, learning about the world, rather than occupying a corner office in the family business and waiting impatiently to take over.

            Another key to success is for the next generation to start somewhere other than the top. When Nancy and D’Arcy moved to London and got involved with the business, they started at mid-level, reporting not to her father but to a general manager.

            “That was key, that they reported to someone other than me,” Dave told me when I was writing the story.

            Family businesses can take all the right steps and still fail, of course. Moffatt and Powell is in a tough industry, dependent on housing starts that ebb and flow with the performance of the economy. As the business battles behemoths like Home Depot, it is not encumbered by family or management strife, however. And that’s a key element to get right, if a company is going to survive and be passed from one generation to another in perpetuity. 

#Cincinnati road trip to see @BlueJays play @Reds, visit @NewportAquarium

Cincinnati…who knew?

           The novelty of interleague play in baseball has long since passed. What started in 1997 as a rare spectacle has become commonplace, with at least one interleague game every day now that the American and National Leagues each have 15 teams. When the split was 16 National and 14 American, there was no need for interleague matchups.

            Whatever the larger implications of continued interleague play are, this past weekend it delivered the Blue Jays to Cincinnati for a rare series there. The two teams had only ever played 12 times.

            Spencer and I headed out Friday morning for what we expected would be a 7-8 hour drive from London, crossing the border at Detroit and heading straight down I-75 to the Queen City (a nickname Charlotte, NC, also uses btw). Torrential rain, traffic jams and a search for chewable, children’s Advil in Monroe, Michigan, added some time to the journey. We arrived in Cincinnati around 6:30 Friday night.

            We had tickets to Saturday’s ballgame, so we planned to spend the evening checking out some of the sights of the city. Having never been to Cincinnati or given it much thought, I didn’t realize it sits right on the Ohio-Kentucky border, essentially sharing its metropolitan area with Covington, Kentucky. Maybe they could borrow another nickname and become the Twin Cities.

            We stayed in Covington, and were only a 10-15 minute walk away from Great American Ballpark, a terrific venue that holds about 45,000 people and features all kinds of attractions, food and fun. It’s a throw or two from Paul Brown Stadium, where the Bengals play. Both sit on the river and look great from a vantage point on the other side.

Cincinnati, across Ohio River as seen from Covington, Kentucky

            After checking in, we grabbed a cab and headed to Newport on the Levee, a collection of restaurants and shops, anchored by the Newport Aquarium, which was worth the trip all by itself. The Levee sits on the Kentucky side of the river. The cabbie was listening to the Jays-Reds game, and as we headed out for the evening, the score was 8-0 Reds…in the second inning. Ouch. Wearing our Blue Jays hats, we were among a handful of Jays fans roaming around the area, none too happy with the way the first game of the weekend series had started.

            We stumbled across GameWorks, a cool place for all ages, with video and active games, some retro and some designed to spit out tickets so kids can spend $50 to take home a $5 prize purchased with their winnings. We played everything, including old-school pinball, a first for Spence.

            By the time we had burned through our tokens and Spence had spent his tickets in the prize zone, it was the 7th inning of the game. We sat down at the adjoining bar to watch. Whoa, it was now 9-8 Reds. The Jays had come almost all the way back. We watched for a while, and then hopped in another cab back to the hotel. We got there in time to watch the 9th inning in the bar, jammed with Reds fans. We watched the Jays tie the score at 9, then pull ahead 10-9, 11-9, then boom, 14-9, thanks to a 3-run home run from Edwin Encarnacion, his second 3-run bomb of the game.

            Sure it would have been fun to be at that game, but watching it from across the river, among all those Reds fans, was a blast. It also inoculated us somewhat for what was to follow the next day, when we walked across the purple bridge, a 15-minute stroll from our hotel to the ball game.

            Like the night before, the Jays fell behind 8-0. Unlike the night before, there was no miracle comeback. They fell 11-1 in front of a sell-out crowd, announced as the 100th sell-out in the short history of Great American Ballpark. There were lots of Jays fans, decked out like we were in Jays shirts and hats. Despite the scorching heat and lopsided result, it was a fun afternoon.

            We missed the rubber match Sunday afternoon because we were driving home, this time in better conditions, making it an 8-hour trip. I came home raving about Cincinnati, but the truth is I saw very little of the city. Most of our time was spent in much smaller and cozier Covington, Kentucky.

            Wherever we were, it was a great weekend. On the way home, with lots of time to talk and make plans, we decided we would have to hit the road again next year to see the Jays play somewhere else. We’ll have to wait for the schedule to come out before deciding where to go. It will be difficult to top this past weekend, however. It was a blast.

We saw dozens of amazing creatures at the Newport Aquarium, including sharks, jellyfish and a 90-year-old Galapagos turtle. We also enjoyed an up-close visit with some African black-foot penguins.

Empire strikes back... #MrLube files motion to avoid paying #BotchedOilChange judgment #LdnOnt #LameExcuses #ThrowingEmployeesUnderBus

Think back to when you were in school and how many excuses you heard or used for not getting your homework done on time.

Dogs seem to figure into the story more often than they should, but there’s also the spilled coffee routine and – most common in the classes I teach at Western – a printer that’s out of ink or just won’t print. Having wrestled with printers that wouldn’t speak to my computer or wouldn’t accept shiny new ink cartridges, I am sympathetic to the printer excuse. Maybe that’s why I hear it so often from my students.

In any case, my legal arch nemesis, Matt Rowswell, owner of the Mr. Lube franchise that botched my oil change in January, has filed a legal document essentially blaming everyone but himself for failing to respond to my lawsuit and having a judgment rendered against him.

As you can read about more fully in earlier postings below, Matt’s employee stripped my oil pan plug in January, rendering the pan useless. A new one was $600.

Last week, a judge ruled in my favour, awarding me a total of $932.46. That represents a refund of the original botched oil change, the cost of repairing my car and $215 in court costs. I promptly emailed Matt’s right-hand man, Mike Morrow, and asked for payment within seven days. That seems to have concentrated Matt’s mind because for the first time in this process, he responded to me – albeit indirectly.

Matt -- or Donald as he is now referred to in his motion -- had his paralegal flunky, Ronald Trachy of St. Thomas, come by my house Saturday. He dropped off a copy of his Notice to Set Aside Judgment and Permission to File a Defence.

That’s right. Nearly a month after I filed my claim and delivered it to the head office of his company, Cardoc Enterprise, Mighty Matt has sprung into action… and asked for a mulligan. He’s really sorry and all, but three weeks wasn’t enough time to respond to my lawsuit. So now that he’s been found guilty, he would really appreciate it if the court would bend the rules and let him file a defence. You can call him Matt. Or you can call him Donald. Just don’t call him late for court.

Of course, he actually had far more time to think about responding because on April 14, I spoke with his second-in-command, Mike Morrow, and indicated I would sue if they didn’t pay for the repair to my car. As unlikely as it seems, it might just be that Matt/Donald didn’t take any of this seriously until there was a judgment against him.

He has asked the court for a second chance because a “lack of communication within Caradoc Enterprise Inc.” meant the lawsuit “was not brought to my attention in a diligent manner, and that through no fault of my own I was unable to respond in a timely fashion.”

In other words, Matt/Donald is blaming his employees for not letting him know he was being sued. I find that amusing because on May 5 when I delivered the claim to his office, the store manager, Jerry DeLyzer, made a phone call before accepting it from me. He called either Matt/Donald or Matt/Donald’s second-in-command Mike. So it seems reasonable to assume he knew about the lawsuit that day.

Maybe the office isn’t run with the precision of a Fortune 500 organization. After all, the business itself is known as Cardoc Enterprise on its business cards and the business license displayed at its Oxford Street store, but it’s known as Caradoc Enterprise in the motion it just filed.

Having asked for his mulligan, he gets a hearing June 20 to plead his case. I will be on my way to Cincinnati to watch the Blue Jays play that weekend, so I can’t attend. I will, however, submit a motion suggesting his claim is hooey (sorry for the fancy legal terms) and asking the judge to tell Matt/Donald to quit stalling and pay me.

I hope he isn’t counting on his employees to remind him of the court date. They appear to be wholly unreliable. 

More on #BizLondon June cover story, Bela Booteek, #LdnOnt

The street is akin to the eye of a hurricane – at least as I understand it, having never been in a hurricane, eye or otherwise.

            Reportedly, when a hurricane makes land, the eye is eerily calm, sometimes prompting people to come out from shelter, assuming the worst is over. However, all around the eye, the storm continues to rage and damage everything in its path.

            Tiny Covent Market Place in downtown London is a little bit like that. All around it, the business of downtown goes on every day: Crowds flock to Budweiser Gardens, shoppers wander through Covent Garden Market and people come and go to offices, restaurants and bars.

            Yet many people miss this little street, a 200-metre elbow that wraps around the north end of Covent Garden Market connecting King and Talbot streets. There hasn’t always been much to see there. In fact, if you look at Google’s Street View of the north section of the street, last updated five years ago, it’s rather bleak.

            Today, however, that section of road has been revived, with the arrival of Hotel Metro, the restaurant Blu Duby (originally Braise) and the Market Lane walk-through to Dundas Street.

Two years ago Izabela Maloney arrived on the street and opened Bela Booteek, a women’s clothing and shoe store, modeled after two successful stores she operates in Aylmer of all places. Ask most people in London about Aylmer – 40 minutes southeast of here – and the first comment is likely to be about the Ontario Police College just outside town. There might be some vague notion the area is home to a large concentration of Mennonites and Amish, but that’s about it.

            No one thinks of Aylmer and fashion, but Maloney, a 43-year-old dynamo who came to Canada from Poland 13 years ago, has made her two Bela Booteek locations in Aylmer a destination shopping experience for women across Southwestern Ontario.

            Two years ago, she expanded to London and opened on Covent Market Lane. You can read all about her in this month’s Business London magazine.

            It took me a couple of weeks to track her down for an interview. She was willing but very busy. Evidently, she wears out the pavement between London and Aylmer, going back and forth to her stores every week. We eventually met at the Covent Market store, where I walked in to find four friendly staff members and an even more friendly Bichon Frise dog named Coco.

            The store has been successful, but can’t touch the volume of its Aylmer counterpart. After two years, it’s fair to say most women in London have never noticed the store, sitting as it does in the eye of the downtown hurricane.

            That might change in the coming months because in April, Maloney opened a second location in the former Ross Mayer store on Richmond Row, giving her about 100x more visibility. It’s a smaller store, but it most certainly will introduce the name Bela Booteek to more shoppers, many of whom will be shocked to discover there is a larger version of the store across from Covent Garden Market.

covent garden market

            Sometime in the next year or so, she would like to buy a building and consolidate her two London outlets into one, large and fabulous store. It will take some doing. She’s not going to move into a strip mall, just to find the space she needs.

            As you will understand if you read this month’s BL cover story, Maloney achieves the goals she sets for herself. So look for an amalgamated Bela Booteek somewhere downtown in the not too distant future. And if you’re ever in Aylmer…

Part four on suing #MrLube for #BotchedOilChange. While #JoeFontana awaits verdict, victory is mine! #LdnOnt

While London mayor Joe Fontana waits for a judge to render a verdict June 13 in his case, I got great news today about my equally weighty, but lower profile, legal battle with the elusive Matt Rowswell, owner of two London Mr. Lube franchises.

The mayor is charged with breach of trust by a public official, fraud and uttering forged documents. I was at the court house twice last week, the first time during Mayor Joe’s trial, when the place was abuzz with what passes for excitement there.

A judge is now deciding whether to believe Joe’s explanation for making numerous changes to an expense report and then submitting it for payment for something entirely unrelated to its original purpose. Not to jump the gun, but if that doesn’t constitute fraud, I’m not sure what the word means.

In my case, a judge – and I wish I knew which one but I can’t decipher his signature on the Endorsement Record I received in the mail today – ruled in my favour against Mystery Matt.

For those just catching up, the fine folks at Mr. Lube on Oxford at Wonderland botched my oil change in late January, stripping the oil pan plug and causing a gushing oil leak about eight weeks later. I needed a new oil pan. Not having one on hand, I had to pay Leavens VW about $600 to install one. Mystery Matt’s second banana, Mike Morrow, offered to pay half the cost of the repair but declined to refund the cost of the original oil change, a whopping $126. So I sued. For more details, read earlier posts, below.

The winning judgment

The judgment is for the cost of the repair, the cost of the oil change and $215 in court costs, just under $1,000 in total. The judge did not allow my claim for the cost of a rental car I had for four days whilst my car was being repaired. Fair enough. I also was awarded interest on all of these costs, which isn’t all that important unless Mystery Matt continues his strategy of avoiding me at every turn.  

I won the case because he didn’t respond to the suit within the allotted three weeks. Now that I have a judgment, it’s up to me to wrest the money from Matt and his high-road company, Cardoc Enterprise. I’ll start this week by contacting Mike Morrow and asking for a cheque next week. On the off chance Matt can’t find his cheque book or is out of town taking an ethics course, I would have to follow up with the court and ask for assets to be seized and so on.

That, of course, is a worst case scenario. I’m confident old Matt will happily pay up. There might even be a cheque in my mailbox right now. I’m going to see…

Part three on suing #MrLube #BotchedOilChange #LdnOnt and #JoeFontana

For a minute yesterday, I thought maybe everyone suddenly was interested in my ongoing legal dispute with Mr. Lube franchise owner Matt Rowswell.

I went to the London court house to file a default motion against old Matt because he had failed to respond to the claim I filed three weeks ago in Small Claims Court.

Matt Rowswell?

The background of this story is available below in earlier blog postings, but suffice to say one of his Mr. Lube technicians (loosely defined) wrecked my oil pan in late January in the midst of a $125 oil change. Eight weeks later, that led to a gushing oil leak that cost about $600 to repair, required me to rent a car for several days and got me thinking perhaps I should get a refund of my original $125.

Matt’s right hand man, Mike Morrow, offered to pay half the cost of the repair, which I thought missed the mark by a significant amount. So I sued Matt’s company, Cardoc Enterprise Inc., for $2,000, which is a rather conservative estimate of all my costs, including the time I’ve spent chasing around after the elusive Matt and Mike duo. With their aversion to contact of any kind, they make Howard Hughes and J.D. Salinger look like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. (Matt, I’ll explain that reference if I ever have the pleasure of meeting you.)

I got to court just after 10 yesterday morning, and the place was abuzz. Of course, I soon realized that wasn’t because of my motion but because our fair city’s mayor, Joe Fontana, was in the second day of his trial, charged with breach of trust by a public official, fraud and uttering forged documents. The actions are alleged to have taken place when Fontana was serving his country as a Liberal MP and cabinet minister in 2005.

Mayor Joe Fontana

One wonders how many backbench Liberals decided to get out of politics the day Joe Fontana was chosen ahead of them to be Minister of Labour in the Paul Martin cabinet. Yikes Martha, if I can’t nose out this guy, what am I doing here?

Several floors below Joe’s trial, it was a good news-bad news day in Small Claims Court. I managed to file my default motion against Matt, which allows me to proceed and try to collect $2,000 from him.

However, because I am claiming damages – as in, his company damaged my car – I have to ask a judge to determine if my damage claim is reasonable. Which means I have to file more paperwork, this time around a Notice of Motion and Supporting Affidavit. I’ll do that in the next few days and swing by the court house a fourth time.

By then, we may know the fate of our second-rate mayor, and the courthouse should be far less crowded.

On @LondonMusicHall and the #deadmau5 turning point

In October, 2010, many of the journalism students I teach at Western University were beside themselves with excitement. They were looking forward to a concert in downtown London by an artist whose name crashed my spell checker: deadmau5.

 In one of my classes, students write a review of some kind – movie, book, restaurant or whatever interests them. That year, roughly half wrote about the concert. So I read numerous accounts of the performance and eventually came to understand a few basic facts.

Deadmau5 live at iTunes festival London Roundhouse, Camden, 2012. 

For starters, deadmau5 is pronounced ‘Dead Mouse’. That is something closer to common knowledge today, after Mr. Maus appeared on the Grammys in 2012 among other high-profile venues. I also discovered what exactly he does on stage that excites so many fans. He’s a DJ and one of the pioneers of progressive house music, aka electronic dance music.

Like another music pioneer also named Zimmerman a couple of generations earlier, Niagara Falls native Joel Zimmerman chose a catchier name with which to launch his career.

Early in 2010, London promoter Derek Hsiung started talking to London Music Hall owner Mike Manuel about bringing deadmau5 to London and staging an event unlike anything the city had ever seen. “They had been doing this in Europe for years, but it hadn’t been done here,” Hsiung recalls.

I talked to Hsiung when I was writing about Manuel and the Music Hall for this month’s Business London magazine cover story.

London Music Hall has become one of the country’s best and most popular live music venues, gaining the respect and admiration of artists, agents and promoters across Canada. It will host 275 events this year, entertaining about 200,000 people in the process. A renovation last fall transformed an already popular venue into something worthy of its recent nomination for Top Club Venue at the Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Awards in Toronto.

Four years ago, Manuel and Hsiung envisioned a huge downtown tent party, headlined by deadmau5. As Hsiung says in this month’s story, “It was crazy. Half the people buying tickets for $40 or $50 had no idea what they were buying.” They sold 6,000 tickets and threw a party that impressed not just the crowd under the tent that night, but plenty of influential people in the Canadian music scene.

Reading student accounts of the concert, I quickly realized how popular and innovative deadmau5 was and is. What I didn’t understand was how the event had burnished the reputation of the London Music Hall, putting it in the big leagues from that day forward. As Manuel says, it took years to build a reputation for excellence among agents and promoters. “They need more than just the space. They need perfection. They’re booking 500-1,000 shows a year and don’t have time for mistakes.”

The deadmau5 show was the biggest and best demonstration of the Music Hall’s ability to achieve perfection. Of course, it also raised expectations, something Manual and Hsiung realized immediately.

“We looked at each other that night and asked, ‘What now?’ What would people expect after that,” Hsiung recalls. What followed was an ongoing collaboration that stages an annual Block Party the first week of September and an annual Tent Party that coincides with Western’s Homecoming weekend, both of which continue to be popular among students at Western and Fanshawe College.

The original deadmau5 concert demonstrates precisely how and why the London Music Hall has achieved everything it has in the last nine years. From the beginning, when he opened the smaller venue Rum Runners next to his laser tag business, Mike Manuel has dreamed big and remained steadfastly focused on achieving those dreams. When Rum Runners was sitting empty for weeks at a time, he resisted the temptation to simply open up as a night club. “We were a venue, booking events. We stayed true to that philosophy, even when we were empty for a whole weekend.”

When he converted the larger laser tag operation into the London Music Hall, continuing Rum Runners alongside, he ran the operation with a level of professionalism that impressed everyone he dealt with. Word started to spread throughout the music community: This was a venue worth playing. Last year, Manuel spent about $1-million to renovate the venue into something rather spectacular. Check out Steve Martin’s excellent photos in Business London to see for yourself.

Or get down to the venue itself. It’s the heart of London’s music scene, and less of a secret every day.

The latest on suing #MrLube #BotchedOilChange #LdnOnt

            Here’s the latest on my epic legal battle with Matt Rowswell, the owner of two Mr. Lube franchises here in London.

            To recap: I took my VW Tiguan in for an oil change in January. The technician (loosely defined) stripped the threads on my oil pan whilst replacing the oil pan plug. As you might suspect, that’s not ideal and led to a gushing oil spill a few weeks later, the evidence of which is still on my garage floor. (For more details, read my previous post.)

            I filed my claim today at the London court house. It took about 45 minutes and cost $75. A surprisingly pleasant experience. The guy ahead of me in line was filing the last paperwork for his divorce and seemed jubilant.

            I took my officially stamped document over to Mr. Lube at 1149 Highbury Ave., the headquarters of the Rowswell empire, officially known as Cardoc Enterprise. There was no sign of Matt and no sign of his second-in-command Mike Morrow. I was sort of hoping to see Mike to make sure he was OK. Three weeks ago, he promised to call me back after discussing my situation with his boss, and since he hadn’t called I started to worry he might have suffered some kind of terrible accident or been stricken with a flesh-eating disease.

My VW Tiguan

            In their absence, I gave the paperwork to store manager Jerry De Lyzer. He was very agreeable and took the envelope from me after making a quick phone call. I now have to file an affidavit with the court letting them know Jerry was the one who took the paperwork. It’s worth noting he didn’t seem the least bit surprised to be served with legal papers, leading me to wonder if that was part of his job description at Cardoc Enterprise. 

While he was outside making his clandestine phone call, a friendly employee not working on a car came over to chat me up. She saw my Tiguan outside and told me Matt Rowswell’s wife drives the same car. And then she told me they are “tricky to work on,” because they require special tools and such.

Mrs. Rowswell's TW Tiguan

Presumably, Matt is aware of that, given that he owns two Mr. Lube franchises and is co-owner of a Tiguan himself.

            Now, Matt has 20 days to file a defence. If he doesn’t, I file another claim and he’s found guilty. If he files a defence we meet in a settlement conference, followed by an actual trial if we can’t reach a settlement.

            I kind of hope we have a settlement conference. That might be the only time I get to meet Matt face-to-face. I want to ask him where his wife gets her oil changed.

Why I'm suing #MrLube #BotchedOilChange #LdnOnt

For most people, the court system is little more than the backdrop for some of our favorite movies and TV shows. We might get a glimpse of the courthouse when called for jury duty, as I was two years ago. But even then, we’re likely to be done that day -- not chosen for a case or rejected by one of the two sides, as I was after my name was called.

Here in London, Ont., the courthouse is one of the ugliest buildings in the downtown skyline, a dreary concrete edifice with all the charm of the Grinch on Christmas Eve. Thousands of people drive by the building every day without giving any thought to what goes on inside.

I’ll be heading down there sometime in the next week or so. I’m going to sue someone.

I’ve only ever sued one person, a deadbeat who hired me to write some promotional copy for his business and then refused to pay. I won rather easily since he didn’t really have – or offer – a defence. Winning easily in small claims court is not really that easy. It takes time and money to fill out the various forms and it takes months for your little action to snake its way through the bureaucracy. But it does eventually.

Winning also doesn’t mean you swing by the courthouse to pick up the money the court has awarded you. What you get is a judgment saying the defendant owes you the money. Then it’s up to you to collect it. In my case, after trying for weeks to contact the deadbeat, I simply walked into his office and demanded payment. Surprised to see me, he offered a weak excuse and wrote a cheque. He then asked me to sign a form indicating I would cease further legal action after being paid. That he had this form handy suggested maybe getting sued was not a new experience for him.

Next week I’m going to sue Matt Rowswell. He owns at least two Mr. Lube franchises in London, at 1149 Highbury Ave. and 591 Oxford St. W. I don’t know much more about him because he refuses to talk to me.

At the end of January, I went to his Oxford St. location and had my oil changed for $126.25. That’s a lot to have the oil changed, but I drive a Volkswagen and that seems to inflate the cost of oil changes regardless of where they’re done. What I didn’t know that day was that the technician (loosely defined) stripped the threads on the oil pan when he screwed in the oil pan plug. As a result, within six weeks, I had a gushing oil leak.

Because it was still winter and because the floor of my garage was always wet from melting snow, I didn’t notice the oil on the floor right away. I think a week went by before I noticed a slick even Capt. Joseph Hazelwood of Exxon Valdez fame would have found impressive. So I took the car, a 2012 Tiguan, to my VW dealership, Leavens Volkswagen here in London. The car was and is under warranty. I left the car early that morning, hopped on the shuttle and looked forward to having it fixed that night.

Alas, it was not to be.

The Leavens technicians (appropriately defined) discovered the damaged oil pan threads and let me know the only fix was to order a new oil pan, which would take two or three days to arrive. My car could not be driven at that point, so I rented a car and sashayed over to Mr. Lube to let them know what had happened. I talked to store manager Ryan Dick and asked him to call Leavens to arrange to pay for the repair. It seemed obvious to me that the botched oil change six weeks earlier had caused the subsequent leak. Funny how these things work, but Ryan Dick was unable to connect with anyone at Leavens. And he was unable to pay me directly for the repair.

He did give me the name of his area supervisor, Michael Morrow (Michael.mrlube45@gmail.com) whom I called after I got my car back. By then I knew exactly what the repair cost: $591.21. Michael Morrow would not give me Matt Rowswell’s contact information, saying “that’s my job, to make sure you don’t talk to him.”

2012 VW Tiguan

After a lengthy soliloquy about Mr. Lube policies and the vagaries of changing VW oil pan plugs, he offered to pay for half of the repair. I responded by asking if he believed I was half to blame for the damage to my car. Oh no, he said, I wasn’t to blame at all. That was good to hear. I could sleep better that night.

I told him I expected his employer to pay for the entire repair. I also said that if I didn’t hear back, I would sue him for the repair costs, the cost of the rental car and for the $126 I paid in January for the crappy oil change.

That comes to something over $1,200, not including the fees I will pay to file the claim, not including the time I’m wasting by doing all this, for which I expect to be compensated as well. (On a side note, just because Enterprise will ‘pick you up’ when you need a car, don’t expect to save any money. It cost more than $500 for me to rent a Dodge Avenger for four days. Ouch.)

That conversation with Michael Morrow was April 14. He must be a busy man because he has yet to get back to me to let me know what his owner said when he passed along my message.

Several people have suggested they might be stalling or putting me off to see if I’m serious about suing. I can’t believe they would do that. Michael Morrow promised to call me back. Maybe he lost my number. Also, when Mr. Lube sends regular emails with special offers and links to surveys, their representatives make it very clear they consider customer service to be their top priority. So I’m sure there has just been a mix-up.

Just to be sure though, I’ll file the court papers next week. And when I need my next oil change, I’ll go to my dealership. Turns out they charge $25 less and seem to know what they’re doing.

Retail stupidity -- What's up at #Superstore and #Michaels?

The woman rushed up to me with all the urgency of an ER nurse, her expression presaging the importance of what she was about to say.

            “If you want your tax refunded,” she said earnestly, “you need to go over to customer service.”

            Huh?

            I was at the Real Canadian Superstore, a grocery store familiar to many Canadians, where service has been slashed -- but not quite to the bone. One of its sister stores, Loblaws, is slightly fancier while the other sister – the homely one – is aptly named No Frills. And indeed, there are no frills to be found there, only empty boxes stacked high near the checkout area where you are invited to pack your own groceries, and by pack I mean balance them precariously in flimsy boxes with half their original rigidity, before dodging traffic while hauling them out to your car.

            But I digress. I was at the Superstore, on what turned out to be No Tax Day. Since we don’t pay sales tax on most groceries in Ontario, the No Tax hoopla that Superstore rolls out every few months doesn’t register with me. If I were about to buy a TV from my local grocery store, or maybe outfit my whole family with Joe Fresh disposable clothes, then I would punch No Tax Day into my Google calendar and synch it with every device in my house. My toaster would tell me it was No Tax Day.

            However, since I tend to buy mostly non-taxable groceries at the Superstore, my toaster remains out of the loop.

            Where once I balked at the idea of scanning my own groceries, I now search out the opportunity, confident I can get out of the store more quickly than going through the conventional check-out line. (I’ve even been known to steal the odd 5-cent plastic bag – going all Naomi Klein on the global capitalist power structure. Occupy This.)

            I scanned my groceries and then paid quickly and painlessly by simply tapping my credit card on the magic payment screen. That’s when the cashier/ER nurse arrived to tell me what was required if I wanted to get in on Tax Free Day.

            “I tried to get here before you paid, but you were too quick,” she said. Amid my confusion, I felt a twang of guilt for being so gosh darn efficient. “I was going to credit your tax before you paid,” she continued. “But now that you’ve paid, you have to go to customer service to get your tax back.”

            That’s when I noticed how much tax I had paid: 82 cents. I don’t know how low that number needed to go before I would have walked away, but 82 cents was enough incentive for me to head to customer service, where, like all customer service counters, there are two inalienable rules: We move at our own pace and there is always one person at the counter buying lottery tickets.

            I walked out with an 82-cent credit, marveling at the software engineering and development Superstore and its Loblaw parent company were using. They have a machine that allows me to scan anything in their store and then weighs what I’ve scanned to make sure I’m being honest. They allow me to pay by simply tapping my credit card on a pad. But, to rebate the equivalent of the tax I’ve paid, they require their employees to dash amongst six self-check kiosks, interceding just as customers attempt to pay. If they are late or distracted or trip or are perhaps making someone else’s rebate magically appear, well the only recourse is to direct the uber-efficient shopper to customer service.

            Do the IT people at Loblaw head office blush when they send out instructions to hundreds of stores in preparation for No Tax Day? Do they apologize for not being able to insert a line of code that would credit the tax automatically, circa 1986?

            The stupidity of that transaction was still rattling around in my head the next day when I went to buy a picture frame at Michaels, the arts and crafts store that works very hard to bring together two modern-day vices – hoarding and extreme couponing. Clutter is the operating philosophy at Michaels, as is the endless distribution of 40-per-cent-off coupons.

            Standing in line to pay for my picture frame, which, to be fair, was discounted 60 per cent, I got to hear the cashier spiel several times. In addition to asking the inane, “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” question and pimping for a donation to the charity-of-the-day, the friendly woman asked each customer for her email address. In response, every shopper, all clearly regulars, said she had already given Michaels her email address and received coupons that way.

            To that, the cashier had this remarkable comeback: “The more often you give us your email address, the more offers you get. It’s a kind of loyalty program.”

            If I hadn’t heard her explain it several times, I wouldn’t have believed it. The good folks at Michaels have instituted a system that encourages all their customers to dictate their email addresses to the cashier every single time they shop at the store!

            Four deep in line, picture frame in hand, I heard every person ahead of me list her email address in the same manner by which the U.S. president takes the oath of office on inauguration day – section by section, so the cashier could keep up as she entered the information into the computer.

            On an average April weekday afternoon, this ridiculous process created quite an impressive bottleneck at the check-out counter. Imagine how much more havoc it could create on a busy Saturday afternoon. How about in December when every second person is lining up to buy materials to fashion a jolly Christmas wreath?

            Companies everywhere, from Apple to Starbucks, WestJet to Zappos, are simplifying their products and processes to make every interaction as simple and enjoyable as possible. And then we have the Superstore and Michaels, designing systems that do the opposite, in the guise of a customer benefit.

            I guess I should be thankful Michaels doesn’t sell lottery tickets.